Technology assisted reproduction techniques in which embryos are handled independently from their mammalian biological source are growing in importance and frequency of use. Such techniques have great direct benefit to persons unable to have babies through unassisted sexual reproduction. The agricultural industries also increasingly rely upon such assisted reproduction techniques. Embryo manipulation is used in livestock reproduction to control such things as the faster genetic evolution of cattle and permitting the genetic characteristics of a single exceptional cow or bull to be passed on to far greater numbers of offspring than would be possible through unassisted sexual reproduction.
Livestock embryo manipulation is becoming more routine due to the development of gene manipulation, cloning, and in vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques. The overall goal of embryo manipulation in livestock is to increase production efficiency, especially with regard to reproduction, milk production or production of specific milk components, lean tissue growth with reduced fat content and decreased susceptibility to specific diseases. Embryo transfer is also used to introduce or rescue valuable germplasm and propagate rare breeding animals such as endangered exotic species.
Expense and relatively low success rates place significant burdens on the use of these assisted reproduction techniques for humans as well as livestock. In human reproduction such expense and failure adds emotional as well as economic burdens. In addition, safeguards against failures often result in unwanted or unmanageable multiple births, as well as additional stored embryos which require maintenance and additional difficult decision making at some later point in time. Expense is the primary concern in livestock reproduction.
Failure rates in reproduction techniques as well as testing and other embryo handling techniques are attributable primarily to the significant handling and manipulation of embryos in executing these techniques. Animal reproductive technologies have advanced in recent years, but the physical tools used in animal reproduction have not changed significantly. Fine-bore glass pipets are still one of the basic tools of the embryologist. Using standard petri dishes, procedures such as in vitro maturation of eggs (IVM), in vitro fertilization, and embryo culture (EC) require picking up and placing individual eggs and embryos several times for each procedure.
Such handling and movement from one petri dish to another provides significant potential for damage or contamination. Perhaps more important, though, is the failure of a stationary embryo in a petri dish to simulate the corresponding natural biological reproduction condition. Some efforts have been made to move embryos in petri dishes via agitation of the dish, but this is a haphazard approach. Expense is also created here due to the relatively large amount of biological medium required for the manual petri dish conventional embryo handling methods. Bovine embryos are individually handled with pipets and large, expensive manipulators. Large quantities of biological medium including growth agents for human embryo culturing renders the corresponding in vitro procedure even more expensive. Livestock growth factors, for example, have costs exceeding $200 per 50 .mu.g.
Such static culture systems also fail to allow for changing the milieu in the culture medium as the embryo develops. Current culture systems with flowing medium have culture chambers as small as 0.2 to 0.5 ml. However, the culture volumes are greater than needed and medium is replenished too quickly. The endogenous growth factors that enhance development are diluted out and washed away. The large volumes of medium required substantially increase costs when expensive growth factors, such as IGF-II ($200 per 50 .mu.g) are used. In addition, known systems cannot track individual embryos.
Thus, there is a need for an improved embryo handling device and method which addresses problems in known embryo handling techniques. An improved embryo handling device and method should provide for an improved simulation of natural conditions. It should also provide a building block upon which larger and/or more powerful and accurate instruments may be based, such as embryo culturing systems, embryo analysis systems, embryo storage systems, and similar systems.